


Labyrinthine

by DuskDragon39



Category: The Mechanisms (Band), Ulysses Dies at Dawn - The Mechanisms (Album)
Genre: Also featuring: mysterious but sardonic narrator, Canon-Typical Violence, Extended labryinth metaphors, Gen, Manipulative Bastards, Murder, POV Second Person, The author's apologies to the Mechanisms tag wranglers for the rel tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:48:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25977718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuskDragon39/pseuds/DuskDragon39
Summary: Your story is a labyrinth.Your story is built along wandering lines and windings so vague that you, its architect, cannot trace your way out. It is your scream at its center, your pain that fuels it.(Or: Daedalus and the stories they tell about him.)
Relationships: Aphrodite/Daedalus (Ulysses Dies at Dawn), Daedalus & Icarus (Ulysses Dies at Dawn), Daedalus & Talos (Ulysses Dies at Dawn), Daedalus & Zeus (Ulysses Dies at Dawn), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: The Mechanisms But Without The Mechanisms (Summer 2020)





	Labyrinthine

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Ohnoitsoak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohnoitsoak/pseuds/Ohnoitsoak) in the [mechs_albums_summer_2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/mechs_albums_summer_2020) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> _Explore Daedalus more considering his role in the construction of the City itself, Icarus, "trading under the name Hephaestus" etc etc. I just think he's neat._
> 
> _DNW: First-person POV_  
> 
> 
> This prompt deserves about another 2000 words and 150% less second-person weirdness, but I hope it's enjoyable despite that.  
> Don't ask me who the narrator is. I have no idea.  
> Not beta read, and the commas in this seem to have taken on a life of their own. You have been warned.

Your story is a labyrinth. 

Your story is built along wandering lines and windings so vague that you, its architect, cannot trace your way out. It is your scream at its center, your pain that fuels it. 

Yours is not a story of ideals, of things perfect and archetypal. Your story is twisted and cracked and this close to shattering under the strain.

There’s a lot of other stories about you, you know. They say that your first memory is of falling, cast down from your father’s penthouse suite, your wings burning from the light. They say you landed and you cursed and you swore revenge and that you did the same thing to your own son only twenty years later. Do you think about Icarus, they ask. Do you know why your son cried out for you as he fell into the depths?

You don’t particularly like those stories, do you?

Hephaestus. That’s another story. A good one too. Fire in your soul and hammer and tongs in your fingers. When a young doctor with two good eyes cracks the riddle, you tell him that you’ll build a cure together. It’ll be you and me and that young olympian with the pet snake, you tell him. We’ll find another way. 

But Zeus always has a contingency plan, the bastard, and soon your brilliant doctor is a blind old motherfucker who can’t walk down the street without being spat on. 

Yeah. Good luck with that one. 

Fortunately there’s other tools under that name.

There’s the raging heat of five-hundred furnaces glowing red-hot. There’s the wheeze of the automatic bellows and the clang of a thousand hammers hitting metal. Hephaestus Industries! cries a glowing neon sign. 

You give them their penthouses and their satellites and their prototype laser eyes, and they give you -

Debt. Another tick in the box that will let you one day say “You owe me.” They won’t like that one bit when you finally come to collect. 

Well, Hades might. They seem the type to keep a careful accounting, after all. No lost love for the Olympians either. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t care. 

It’s hard to tell, with Hades. 

There’s the woman you married all those years ago when you fa- sorry, Zeus- first saw you and your twisted leg rise to power. She is vice and fault and hatred poured together and doused in blood. Her line of lovers is longer than the years you’ve been alive- Male, female, both or neither. It doesn’t matter which, and when she’s done she pulls the threads of their lives together and binds them with an arrow. They pity you for it, you think.

What they don’t know is this: she is strength and loyalty as well as vice and hatred. When called to arms, her fury is unmatched, and none could hope to stay her hand. She owes Hera a reckoning, and one day she’ll deliver- for that alone she is worth your time. You do not love each other, but you can use each other, and in a story like this that’s a bond worth more than love. 

No, Hephaestus is not a name without use.

But that’s not even a tenth of your story, the labyrinthine twisted tale that it is. 

No.

Your story starts before the city was fully built, doesn’t it? Before creatures with weirdly elegant mustaches claimed to be nymphs, before Illium was cast down in a rain of blood and your wife sent her son hurtling away from the dawn. 

Go back.

Further, no-

There.

There is the center to your labyrinth:

You stand in the center of the city. No, not that city. Not the one that reaches down and out and up, where generations can live and never see the sun. No. This is before that. This is the start. 

You stand in the center of the city, on the high, round platform that marks the acropolis. Talos crouches beside you, tablet and stylus in hand. Up here, the smoke doesn’t cling quite so badly. The low-lying smog gives the sun a pleasant red tinge as it sets. 

Soon you two - the architects of an old-new world - will have your work cut out for you. For now, though, the afternoon is peaceful, and you relish the quiet calm. 

This will be the last peaceful moment you have for… well. No need to spoil things by putting dates on them.

\---

You stand in your father’s penthouse suite, towering above the city below. 

Build me a labyrinth, my son, your father tells you. Give me a prision large enough to hold the world in its grasp. Give me the keys to its door. Can you do it?

Of course you can. 

There’s only the small matter of payment. 

\---

Make me proud, he says.

You will. Oh, you will. 

\---

Here is what you design: layers upon layers, twisting back in on themselves. A self sustaining prison. 

Your city starts to grow. It creeps out towards the sea, swallowing Athens and Carthage and Sparta, Thivia and Eretria and Illium. They are new corridors in your plan, the first steps in a grand design. A labyrinth with the world at its center. 

Soon enough there’s no land left, so you draft more plans and the City stretches into the sea. When there’s no sea left, it grows into the sky, and when there’s no sky left- well. The only way left is down. 

Your workshop is flying paper and electronic screens. 

Your father claps you on the shoulder.

I’m proud of you, son. 

\---

You stand on the platform that once marked the acropolis. A single sunbeam drifts lazily through the smoke and fog, bathing you in red light. Talos stands beside you, brandishing his tablet and stylus. 

I’ve done it! he cries. Dae- 

He screams as he falls. 

(They’ll say that you killed him out of jealousy. You didn’t. He was simply more useful elsewhere.)

You’ll call it the Acheron, you think. A river of pain, with the technology that enables it guarded by a metallic warrior. You need computing power, after all, and what better source than the human mind?

You’ll need someone to run it, too, to carry those minds from living bodies into the belly of your machine. 

A problem for another day. 

\---

My son, your father says. Your work here is done. 

You will never remember hitting the ground. 

\---

When you wake you are surrounded by darkness. You reach out a trembling hand. Cold metal brushes against your fingers. You roll over and try to push yourself to your feet. Your head hits the roof of your small cell with a painful bang. 

You groan and slump back to the ground. 

The next time you wake, you will laugh, and you will laugh, because your labyrinth now holds you prisoner at its center, and you built it, and one day your father, the Olympians, they will pay for this. 

You owe them a reckoning and that debt will be called in one day. 

\---

Your work is never done. 

\---

There’s more to this story of course. 

There always is- it’s a twisted, labyrinthine tale, after all.

You escaped, destroying your leg in the process. You started looking for a way to break the Acheron and the hold the Olympians had over the Labyrinth. You had a son. You talked your way into the ranks of the Olympians. You sold designs to those who could do the most damage with them. You married. You schemed. You targeted Ulysses, that broken person who held the only hope of taking the Olympians down once and for all. 

Here is the part that they’ll one day immortalize in story and song:

If whatever’s in that vault has any hope of taking the bastards down, then it belongs with you. The suits are just a means to an end that way- they’re all so easily manipulated, and even Hades was willing to help you. 

It took some persuasion, sure, but they don’t have any lost love for the Olympians. Or maybe they just found it amusing. 

It’s hard to tell, with Hades. 

So here you are, Daedalus. Your shoulder aching and your leg unmovable, left lying on the ground as Ulysses opens their vault. 

And you realize-

Somewhere, somehow they found the last relic of that world you transformed. They found it and hid it here, a dying symbol in the heart of stone labyrinth. 

How?

Did they think that it would work?

Did they think that this would free them from your work, from the fate you’ve been trying to dismantle for decades?

And there- as the light from the rising sun touches on the tree, a gravestone. Penelope. 

The first to escape the Acheron since Talos- you nephew- how long has it been since you thought of him?

How long has it been?

Hades could have told you, if you’d thought to ask, but-

How?

The vault door closes behind Ulysses, never to open again. 

Your story is a labyrinth, Daedalus. Your scream echoes at its center. Your plans loop around each other and double back. You entered this, so long ago, and you will not leave without someone else to show you the way out. 

Here lies Daedalus, architect of his own prison, broken and bleeding on the floor.

Here lies Daedalus in the twisted remnants of his own plans, in the shattered remnants of his story. 

May Hades welcome you home, architect.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I have a slight obsession with the labyrinth myth. Oh well.


End file.
